The thousand earths, p.8
The Thousand Earths, page 8
They turned away reluctantly. Mela, looking back, tried to see what became of the baby, but it was lost beneath the legs of the panicking, stampeding adults.
Ish’s hand slipped into Mela’s grasp. ‘Shall we go back to Mother and Father?’
Mela caught Khem’s eye. Khem nodded.
13
Another twenty kilometres due south, another day’s drifting downstream from Capella, with the horse-drawn cart tracking the boat.
Now they came to the last town before the Perimeter – or rather, Mela reminded herself, the last surviving town, for now. She was getting used to Farrell’s company, maybe, thinking like a Perimeter Warden, to whom the world was a fluid, changeable place. A shrinking place.
The town was called Arcturus.
And Arcturus, close to the River like its siblings all the way back to Procyon, was only ten or twelve kilometres from the Perimeter itself.
Not that they were going to get to see the doomed town up close.
Khem led the boat past the city, ignoring narrow canals that led some of the River water to the town walls. A few folk did come out to the edge of town to peer as they past. Mela felt the need to look away, not to make eye contact even at this distance.
Even from a distance, Mela, sitting up on the boat’s structure beside Farrell, saw how static the town was – no traffic approaching it by road or by the water, no people working the smartcrop fields beyond the fence.
Khem tied the boat up far from the River’s closest approach.
But Ish, that bit more naïve, more curious, stood and stared back. ‘Look, Mela. There’s a sort of rope barrier around the town. Can you see? Just a crimson rope on stakes. The people are standing behind it …’
Khem glared that way too. ‘Yes, it is.’
Ish just looked puzzled, but Mela was used to Khem by now. ‘The question – is that a Perimeter Warden rope? Like they have at the Perimeter itself.’ That’s what her father had told them to expect.
Farrell shrugged. ‘This far out it’s just to remind folk. Or train them, maybe, that you don’t want to be on the wrong side of a rope like that without a Permit. The closer you get to the Perimeter the more flaky people get. Of course you have to remember that most people who have Permits have probably already left this place—’
There was a flash of light, a dull concussion.
Mela thought they all flinched. The horses reared, stumbled.
Everybody looked over at the town.
A pall of greasy black smoke was rising up from somewhere in the heart of Arcturus, and Mela saw a flicker of flame. She thought she heard screaming – and perhaps laughter.
Farrell said, ‘There you go. Probably an illegal still blowing up.’
Ish said, ‘Shouldn’t you be going to help? I mean—’
‘Help how?’ Farrell asked. ‘Not my job. Not a fireman. Not a doctor. Guess I might be able to fix the still.’
‘This is why the Wardens stay calm,’ said Khem. ‘At the Perimeter. With their maps and plans and boundaries and bits of rope. Makes people feel calm too.’
Mela thought she understood. ‘So that it looks as if everything is orderly, under control. When in fact it’s all falling apart.’
‘It’s all a trick,’ Farrell said. ‘Like being a father with his kids. You stay calm, they stay calm. It’s all a trick.’
Khem laughed at that. ‘Ha! You, a father to the world.’
‘All you can do. We’ll camp here, then go on in the morning, before everybody wakes up and comes out to stare at us.’
Mela asked, ‘On to the Perimeter?’
‘No, not in the boat,’ Khem said, anticipating the next question.
Ish was wide-eyed. ‘We’ll be in the cart because the River runs too fast here to be safe.’
Khem grunted. ‘Hard pulling for the horses coming back. Even from here, yes.’
‘And the River’s running fast because it’s falling off the edge of the world.’
Khem said nothing.
Mela felt Ish take her hand, as she used to when they were smaller, and their parents were arguing.
‘A burning town over there,’ Ish said softly. ‘And only a few hours to the edge of the world. It’s all awful, Mela, isn’t it?’
Mela squeezed her hand. She had no comfort to offer.
‘We could just go back to the boat,’ Ish whispered. ‘Khem would take us.’
‘Is that what you want?’
‘Yes. No …’
On the wagon rolled.
After a restless night for the twins at least, they washed in boiled river water, nibbled on wild smartcrop – unreasonably delicious – for breakfast. Packed up the crude tents that had sheltered them for the night, harnessed the horses, got back aboard the wagon.
And rode on silently towards the Perimeter.
At first the countryside seemed empty, of people at least, as bare and uninteresting as further out. Just the River, the rutted track they followed south along its bank, and the scattered stands of stunted-looking smartcrop.
But there were subtle changes, Mela thought. Was the southern sky ahead mistier, paler? And in the further distance she thought she saw clouds streaming north, back the way they had come. Some looked heavy, like rain clouds, but most were higher, streaky. Through that increasingly complex sky, she thought she could see Earths, just a handful.
And now, peering ahead, Mela thought she saw a kind of horizon, an edge to the world – no, it was more as if she were approaching a wide cliff top, she thought. A sharp drop in the land, to left and right, as far as she could see.
As they went on the light slowly changed. The clouds reflected a kind of silvery glow, now. The River seemed to flow faster – fast enough for the water, brown with dirt, to make a soft, rushing noise. It spread out too, the single main channel shallowing, the water fanning out into multiple streams, some quite minor.
Farrell, guiding the horses calmly, kept the wagon well away from the wider waters, the softer ground.
‘The river’s spreading out,’ Ish murmured to Mela. ‘Because it’s approaching its mouth. As if it was pouring into a wider lake. But—’
‘But this isn’t any lake,’ Farrell said. ‘No ocean. Used to be an ocean there, beyond the inhabited lands, once. That’s all gone now.’
Again, Ish took Mela’s hand.
Other features in the truncated landscape ahead became visible now. Snakes of smoke, rising up. People, in what looked like rough camps, huddles of tents of some brown fabric. People sitting around sparks of flame.
Abruptly Ish stood up in the cart, and frowned, squinting. ‘Oh, I see. There’s the rope. The Perimeter rope itself. See, Mela? …’
It was the finest of lines, a ruddy thread supported by a row of slim posts, neatly paralleling the cliff-edge limit of the ground. The end of the world, staked out by a bit of rope.
Ish pointed at people moving along the approaching edge, a dozen or so split into pairs and threes. ‘That lot are beyond the barrier.’
Farrell drew the wagon to a halt. ‘This is near enough. We’ll go on foot the rest of the way. No point in a big fuss and alarming everybody. Keep calm,’ he said.
Keep calm. That was a Warden’s mission statement in two words, Mela thought, as she clambered down from the cart.
She felt it was a great comfort to have her feet planted on solid ground. Again, Ish took her hand.
Farrell led the way forward, heading without hesitation towards the edge of the world.
Ish held Mela’s hand, tight.
‘Walk where I walk,’ said Farrell. ‘Step where I step, if you can. And if I say move back,’ he went on softly – and he didn’t finish the sentence.
Now Mela made out more detail. The grassy sward she walked on came to a visible end, not far beyond the crimson rope, like the edge of a ragged cliff in some storybook depiction of the Heartland Mountains. Beyond that, only a pearly, featureless light. What people had once done with this land wasn’t clear. She did see a fence, running down to the edge and ending in a ragged, dangling rip – and then, further back, what looked like a collapsed house – or rather, half-collapsed. Somebody’s home, falling into – what?
Farrell said, ‘You understand what’s happening here? The Tide, the Substrate, is the base layer that holds up our world. Which is a big slab of rock over the Substrate, and a layer of earth and stuff on top of that, with us and our homes and our families on top of that.
‘But the world is shrinking back steadily. Sixty metres a day now, so we are recording. All shrinking back, all around the world, what’s left of it.
‘And it doesn’t do anything neatly. You get great rock slabs sticking out over the Substrate until they break off and just go crashing down. Or sometimes you’ll get a slab breaking off before the exposed Substrate ledge has reached it, and it sort of slides off down, off into nothingness. Doesn’t make much difference to it if you happen to be sitting there picking your scabs at the time.’
‘It’s a sort of empty place,’ Ish said. ‘Not many houses …’
Khem said, ‘We brought you here on purpose.’
‘You wouldn’t want to see the Perimeter taking down a town,’ Farrell said.
Ish seemed to close in on herself, evidently imagining that.
They had got to within a few paces of the crimson boundary rope.
‘This is where we stop,’ Farrell said firmly.
‘He means it. You’re on your own if you go further,’ Khem murmured.
‘But a few people are going in closer.’ Ish pointed.
These were the other folk Ish had spotted from further out, not the campers. Mela saw that some were indeed moving forward, working in pairs, one bracing while the other, handholding, got that bit closer to the edge.
Ish asked, ‘What are they looking for?’
‘Stuff in the ground, maybe,’ Farrell said. ‘Old stuff. The world is an old place, you know, very old, and some of what used to be here ends up in the ground. Bones of vanished animals. Ruins of old cities, all flattened and crushed and burned out, with layers of dirt over the top. Even ships, some say – not like the river boats: big metal ships that once flew in the sky, to other Earths, maybe. Or all the way to the stars like the Perseid is supposed to have done. Just eroding out of the ground, as it all crumbles. Glimpse it and it’s gone.’
Just as her father had told Mela, of how the very earth was full of shards of the past – even at Procyon, and now here.
And Mela thought she understood now why these people – enthusiasts? philosophers? – were prepared to take such a chance. To see the long-gone history of humanity just eroding out of the crumbling ground, even if only to have it snatched away in moments.
‘My father was a Perimeter Warden,’ Farrell said. ‘And his mother before him. And on back, some branch of the family was always in the game. And they say it used to be easier. Slower.
‘See, the way the world is crumbling – it’s shrinking back at a steady rate, if you count it as area. And it’s a big loss, every year the same as a big square slab of rock about twenty kilometres on a side, lost to the world, forever. All around the Perimeter.
‘Nowadays, see, the Perimeter moves back about sixty metres a day, or would if it was even. But in the olden days, when the world was bigger, the drawback must have been tiny. I don’t know. Millimetres a day! All around the Perimeter. Why, once …’
Mela imagined it now, teams of Wardens all around the world, all steadily working, pulling back their boundary markers and ropes over and over, as the edge of the world crumbled. As they had for centuries, she supposed. Back and back, the demarcation line defined by the rope in their hands sweeping over trees and houses, and people …
As Farrell spoke on, Mela was no longer listening. An impulse overwhelmed her. She let go of Ish’s hand.
Stepped over the crimson rope.
Ish called, ‘No, Mela—’
‘Just a couple of steps. We can never do this again …’
Farrell, Khem said nothing.
It was only a few steps.
She didn’t dare go as far as the daredevils or treasure hunters or whatever, not as near the edge as they did. And in the end she couldn’t get close enough to the edge itself to see the ancient animals and starship wrecks eroding out of the crumbling earth.
But she did see what lay beyond the edge.
The River, pouring at last over the lip of the world, dissipated into a floor of mist, a floor that obscured whatever lay below.
The sky above was obscured too by water, by those streaming clouds – all that water pouring as vapour back over her head. Of course, she thought, it must be this way: some kind of mechanism to trap the water that poured off the edge of the world, from all the draining rivers. Water cupped and vaporised, and then somehow sent back to the interior – presumably all the way back to the Heartland Mountains, where it would rain out again, pour back down the river valleys once again. An unending cycle that sustained climate and life on the world, connecting Perimeter to Heartland. As if the whole world was some massive, integrated machine. As perhaps it was.
And now, looking straight ahead through the clearing layers of mist, she saw the Substrate itself. A plain, smashed and broken – like glass, she thought, a glass floor to the world.
The Substrate which lay under the whole world. And to which every interred corpse in every graveyard was promised repose, according to the Perseids – as Aunt Vaer had died believing. Was there really some kind of sanctuary to be found beyond death, down in that silver mystery? Was it just a consoling myth to comfort those left behind …?
She had an odd impulse to walk further, steadily, past the peering philosophers, to step beyond the end of the world, to fall and fall past the spaceships and aurochs, fall and fall into that glassy mystery—
A hand on her arm. She was pulled roughly back.
‘Sorry.’ It was one of the explorer types, a woman, tall, head shaven. She carried a pack, open, with writing materials; she seemed to have been sketching. ‘My name is Seviad. Of Rigel. I’ve come out here a lot, and I’ve seen your sort of reaction.’
‘The Substrate—’
‘The whole view is hypnotic. You’re not the first I’ve seen come close like this. I’ve never seen anyone actually fall. Well, aside from one deliberate suicide. And it is suicide, if you fall into the Substrate. The end of our sort of life, at least, whatever the theories say about what happens next …’
‘Thank you.’ Mela felt a mix of emotions, of reactions: a scalp-prickling realisation, a delayed fear, as she realised how close she had come to slipping over. Shame that she might have put Ish through the experience of watching her fall. But, more than that, a deep stomach-twisting embarrassment.
They walked back towards the rope.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘You don’t need to apologise to me. How old are you, fifteen?’
‘Seventeen. Just.’
‘I was the same at your age.’ She looked around thirty to Mela.
Mela drew herself up. ‘I am Mela of Procyon. That’s my sister, Ish. My father is a Magistrate.’
‘Procyon? Well, I might see you again. I have Permits.’
I might see you again when the world’s end comes a bit closer, and I have to abandon my own home. That was what she meant.
‘Yes,’ Mela said. ‘You’ll find my father.’
‘Ah. He’ll probably have to process me … here’s the rope now.’
‘Thank you.’ She stepped over it.
Ish came to meet her, gave her sister a hug. ‘Don’t ever do that again.’ But she seemed abstracted.
Seviad moved away, smiling. ‘I’ll give you your peace.’
Ish kept hold of Mela.
In the end Ish broke the embrace and stepped back. ‘Why didn’t they tell us? Mother and Father. Tell us it was like this. All this destruction.’
Mela shook her head. ‘Maybe they waited until we were old enough to work it out for ourselves. To come see for ourselves.’
‘Yes. But all this clutter will reach home, reach us at Procyon, in another five years. That’s all. Five years ago we’d just about given up playing with our dolls. Five years is nothing. What then?’
Mela had no answer. It was something she had yet to face, she supposed.
Ish glared at her, then turned away.
Khem had heard all this. ‘You two are done here.’
She meant, Mela realised, they had learned all they were supposed to learn.
Mela asked, ‘Can we go home now?’
‘While it’s still there,’ Ish said. And she stomped away to the wagon.
14
Year 22
Time wore away.
Soon there were only five more years before Procyon would be lost.
Then four, then three.
Then two.
It was then, three years after her jaunt to the Perimeter, that Ish first heard about the Holding Camp, and told Mela about it. A place that arisen outside Procyon itself, a short walk away, generally ignored. Where they were putting people who didn’t fit anywhere else, but were turning up even so.
And Ish wanted to go see it.
Mela, twenty years old, filled with curiosity and dread, tried to discuss it with her father.
Not her mother, of course, who was busier with her meetings and paperwork, her buying and selling, than she ever had been. Now she was even getting visitors from Sirius itself, it seemed.
Even Father had only platitudes. ‘Don’t waste today by fretting about tomorrow. About people you can’t help, things you can’t change.’
But he, too, was becoming busier by the day. He was a Magistrate, and Mela had learned that these days a Magistrate’s key role, reporting to the city council, was dealing with the flow of Immigrants walking up the River, and their rights of entry to the city, or otherwise. Once a trickle, this was now becoming a flood – though a flood that would dwindle with time, Mela supposed, as the threatened communities downstream emptied out one after another, and fell to the Tide. But for now, listening to both her parents’ conversations, she detected more urgency – more friction – a sense that pressure was steadily mounting on the government and society of Procyon, in which they played their different parts.
